The only engagement you actually get is on super-niche subreddits. Other than that, the "engagement" you get on reddit is largely indistinguishable from bot traffic.
The difference is that Lemmy admins across the fediverse aren’t making the user experience worse so they can sell the data to corporations for LLM training
I don't miss the dipshits, pun spammers, and smug power mods of reddit at all. I do miss their niche subs and smarter users. Like it or not, they do have some brainy folks peppered among the shit posters.
We have some good folks here, too. Just need more of them.
It's a shame reddit has been dialing up the shit faucet slowly enough that most of their users don't notice how awful it is now. They've grown accustomed to the poor quality of the content and weaponized greed of the owners.
In all honesty, when I joined Reddit right after digg went to shit. It was amazing. Reddit was great, 3rd party apps were welcome, their interface was straightforward, and they had none of those NFT gold shit.
At that point, they were also open source which was super cool. I always wanted that profile badge you got for submitting a merged PR.
Reddit really went downhill fast after ~2015. I think Lemmy will get there eventually. I remember reddit being a lot smaller back then as well. It took a while to get to the point where niche communities could thrive and I do believe we'll see that happen here as well (even if it takes a decade or so)
I joined maybe 6 years ago, and there was a bit of shit talking and most posts had a troll answer hitting the most votes for some reason, but it was usually pretty good to scroll straight past and find some really insightful comments. There was a lot of good stuff around reddit, but slowly the absurb number of awards, NFT avatars, reposts, and ads every third post started to corrupt it. It was simple enough to switch to a third party app for quite a while, but the garbage slowly took over.
Even if they hadn't pulled 3rd party apps, it was getting pretty close a point where it wasn't worth scrolling past the bullshit.
Oh they're here too. They're not causing too much drama because there's not enough going on, but they're here. Some of them are admins of certain instances.
The ones that aren't here yet will eventually find their way here when Lemmy continues to grow. And the most concerning thing about that is how many more tools Lemmy is providing them to fuck with users.
Called this awhile back, this is why Reddit has such a high evaluation.
Poisoning your data won't do anything but give them more data, do you seriously think reddit servers don't track every edit you make to posts? You'd literally just be providing training data of original human vs poisoned. They'd still have your original post, and they have a copy of everytime you edit it.
Whoever buys reddit will have sole access to one of the larger (I don't think largest though) pools of text training Data on the internet, with full licensed usage of it. I expect someone like Google, FB, MS, OpenAI, etc would pay big $$$ for that.
"But can't people already scrape it?"
Well yes, but it's at best legally dubious in some places
Scraping Data off reddit only gets you current versions of posts (which means you can get poisoned dara, and cant see deleted content), and is extremely slow... if you own the server you have first class access to all posts in a database, including g the originals and diffs of everytime soneone edited a post, and all the deleted posts too.
Think about if you perhaps wanted to train an AI to detect posts that require flagging for moderation, if you scrape reddit data, you can't find deleted posts that got moderated...
But, if you have the raw original data, you 100% would have a list of every post that got deleted by mods and even the mod message on why it was deleted
You surely can see the value of such data, that only owners of reddit are currently privy to atm...
They've also got vote counts and breakdowns of who is making those votes. This data will be worth more for AI training than any similar volume of data other than maybe the contents of Wikipedia. Assuming they didn't have it set up to delete the vote breakdowns when they archived threads.
Why are those breakdowns worth so much? Because they can be used to build profiles on each voter (including those who only had lurker accounts to vote with), so they can build AIs that know how to speak with the MAGA cult, Republicans who aren't MAGA, liberals, moderates, centrists, socialists, communists, anarchists. Not only that, they'll be able to look at how sentiments about various things changed over time with each of these groups, watch people move from one to another as their opinions evolved, see how someone pretends to be a member of whatever group (assuming they voted honestly and posted under their fake persona).
Oh and also, all of that data is available through the fediverse but it's free to train on to anyone who sets up a server. Which makes me question whether the fediverse is a good thing because even changing federation to opt-in instead of opt-out just covers whether your server accepts data from another. It's always shared.
Open and private are on opposite sides of a spectrum. You can't have both, best you can do is settle for something in the middle.
Which makes me question whether the fediverse is a good thing
I'd argue it's good, because it means open source AI has a fighting chance with FOSS data to train on without needing to fork over a morbillion dollars to Reddits owners.
Whatever use cases the reddit data can train on, FOSS researchers can repeat it on Lemmy data and release free models that average joes can use on their own without having to subscribe to shit like Microsoft Copilot and friends to stay relevant.
What if reddit also kept all deleted comments and post, im sure there are shit loads of things people type out just to delete, thinking all the while it'll never see the light of day.
The problem (for most) was never that people's public posts/comments were being used for AI training, it was that someone else was claiming ownership over them and being paid for access, and the resulting AI was privately owned. The fediverse was always about avoiding the pitfalls of private ownership, not privacy.
It's exhausting constantly being "that guy," but it really needs to be said constantly; private ownership is at the core of nearly every major issue in the 21st century.
The same goes for piracy and copyright. The same goes for DMCA circumvention and format shifting content you own. The same goes for proprietary tech ecosystems and walled gardens. Private ownership is at the core of the most contentious practices in the 21st century, and if we don't address it shit like this will just keep happening.
In regards to the editing part, sure, I'm sure they can track your edit history. However, on a large scale, most edits are going to be to correct things. To determine if an edit was to poison the text, it would likely require manual review and flagging. There's no way they're going to sift through all of the edits on individual accounts to determine this, so it's still worthwhile to do.
Although they could sidestep the issue a bit by simply comparing the changes between edits. Huge changes could just be discarded, while minor ones are fine.
So the old trick of “search term +reddit” no longer will work then huh?
I’ve already made a habit of adding date limiters to web results from before before LLMs were made public… The SEO ‘optimization’ game of before was bearable, but the LLM spam just ruins so many search results with regurgitated garbage or teaspoon deep information
During the peak of the great purge, it was quickly becoming pointless. A lot of results were bringing up deleted posts. It took a while for search engines to catch up and start filtering a lot of those results out.
With respect to 2, it would stop others scrapping the content to train more open models on. This would essentially give Reddit exclusive access to the training data.
Sounds like something a bunch of
governments would be interested in. As you pointed out you get to see why human mods made certain decisions. Could you an edge in manipulation.
And ya know what? Frankly, if AI is going to harvest all this shit, I'd rather fuckers like spez couldn't get rich off it in the process. Granted I'm not happy the tech bros running these AI companies are getting rich with these fucking things, but I can at least take solace that, for Lemmy at least, there isn't some asshole middle man making bank off the work and words of users they never paid a dime to.
Genuinely, why does Sepz and Reddit deserve to make money off anything we posted? Why does any social media site? They make the site, pay for the servers, maintain the apps, sure, and they can get compensation for that, I don't see a problem there. But why does any social media company deserve to get rich when the only thing that makes their platform valuable is the people that post to it? Reddit didn't even have paid mods, the community did all the work on the content of that site, why in the fuck do we tolerate these assholes making profit off it like this?
I was curious if a robots.txt equivalent exists for AI training data, and there was some solid points here:
If I go to your writing, I read it & learn from it. Your writing influences my future writing. We've been okay with this as long as it's not a blatant forgery.
If a computer goes to your writing, it reads it & learns from it. Your writing influences its future writing. It seems we are not okay with this, even if it isn't blatant forgery.
[AI at the moment is] different because the company is re-using your material to create a product they are going to sell. I'm not sure if I believe that is so different than a human employee doing the same thing.
I still think we should have the ability to opt out like we do with search engines and webcrawlers, but if the algorithm works ideally and learns but does not recycle content, is it truly any different from a factory of workers pumping out clones of popular series on Amazon? I honestly don't know the answer to that.
The problem is not the technology, the problem is the businesses and the people behind them.
These tools were made with the explicit purpose of taking the content that they did not create, repurposing them, and creating a product. Throw all these conversation about intelligence and learning out the fucking window, what matters is what the thing does, and why it was created to do that thing.
Until we reach a point where there is some sort of AI out there that has any semblance of free will, and can choose not to learn if fed certain information, and choose not to respond to input given to it without being programmed to do not respond, then we are not talking about intelligence, we are talking about a tool. No matter how they dress it up.
Stop arguing about this on their terms, because they're gaslighting the fuck out of you.
This is kinda my take on it. However, the way I see it is that the AI isn't intelligent enough yet to truly create something original. As such, right now AI is closer to being a tool than a being. Because of that, it somewhat bothers me that I'm being used to teach a tool. If I thought that companies like OpenAI were truly trying to create beings and not tools, then I'd feel differently.
It's kinda nuanced, but a being can voluntarily determine whether or not something is copyright infringing, understand why that might be an issue, and then decide whether or not to continue writing based on that. A tool can't really do that. You can try and add filters to a tool to avoid writing copy written text, but that will have flaws and holes in it. A being who understands what it's writing and what makes it plagiarism vs reference vs homage/inspiration/whatever is less likely to have those issues.
I stopped using reddit after they dropped the bomb on the devs and I'm not a fan of the company.
I understand the hatred towards them, but this is definitely expected from a company like reddit, and any other social media for that matter. As users we must be aware that we don't own the content in their platform.
I wouldn't be surprised if the same story comes from Instagram tomorrow, though I suppose there will be a bigger outcry then.
Honestly over the last year since the great migration, the discussions on lemmy have really grown and matured to the point where i don't really see the value of reddit anymore
The real value of reddit for me lies in its cache of information contained in answers to questions from over the years. Whenever I'm looking online for a solution to a problem I'm trying to solve I'll eventually add "reddit" to the search and I almost always find the answer that way.
The only use I have for Reddit anymore is for super niche information. For example we were planning to go to Six Flags Discovery Kingdom today but it's going to rain this afternoon. I checked their site and it said they were open 11-6, my BIL checked their app and at 11:30 it said they were currently closed. Found a Reddit post from someone confirming the park was closed for the weekend, and we didn't waste a trip up. (as an extra annoying aside, apparently this information was posted on Six Flag's Instagram page, because expecting a huge company to maintain a website is I guess just too much when they can offload it to social media.)
Don't know if it was against usage terms, but I have been able to get chatgpt answers written 'in the style of' various subreddits since the initial release (or perhaps the second release)
Yes but i think reddit is many times more valuable than Lemmy. I just haven't found the same level of very specific subreddits that have lots and lots of activity. Most of the traffic here is memes, politics, news and Linux lovin. On reddit if I needed to find a community about my local town it's no problem and there are tens or hundreds of daily posts. The same community does exist on Lemmy but the last post was 6 months ago.
I completely agree. There are lots of communities on Reddit that are missing on Lemmy. Have you tried posting your community? It might entice people to participate!
Well there's copyright law. There's already lawsuits happening so we'll have to see how this shakes out.
But even if the AI companies lose the lawsuits, I think it's likely they'll still have access to content where the T&C of the site says they're allowed to sell the data.
Hm but don't you automatically own the stuff you create yourself, as long as you don't consent to giving it away? I don't know the terms and conditions of my Lemmy instance though.
When was the last time anyone read the T&Cs of a social media website?
They basically all have a clause to the effect that you grant them a permanent, irrevocable license do whatever they want with anything you post.
You might still own the copyright to any content you produce, but by posting you’re granting them permission to do basically anything with it, including reselling it.
Well of course, that's the #1 reason why everyone stopped providing free-to-use APIs last year. Because AI companies were getting all that data for free via those APIs.
Slightly unrelated question, but is there an easy way to delete all my Reddit posts and comments? I used the Nuke add-on in the past, but it doesn't work anymore.
I wanna delete my Reddit account, but I'd prefer to erase my history before doing that.
back when I made my Lemmy account I used a tool called redact to masse edit my Reddit comments into gibberish and then after a few days of making sure it got them all, I deleted them all and then my account.
j0be's version of Power Delete Suite was already broken before the APIcalypse, as Reddit imposed a limit of 5s between edits. Pkolyvas' version will probably work better, if PDS still works at all.
Who cares? Fuck reddit. Half the content is bots anyway. So, bots stealing content to train AI to make content, which the bots will steal and repost. Circle of death for reddit. Good luck with that IPO.
If they hadn't applied the same charges to legitimate 3rd party applications they could still do this and have avoided the massive community backlash.
Considering their horrible track record with advertising and selling Reddit premium this should be the single best way for them to finally monetize their platform. They didn't need to destroy what little credibility they had remaining to their users to get to this point, but for whatever reason they did.
Not only did they have the option, as I understand it the API was even configured as such since all requests from an app shared the same API key. They're basically whitelisting like this now but only for the accessibility oriented 3rd party apps.
I just Googled my reddit handle and it's appalling that I found websites on the internet that archived a bunch of my posts on there including pictures I posted. I'm not sure what I expected, but it's still kinda annoying. Even though I deleted my comments after editing them and deleting my entire account
Damn. I keep meaning to use one of those things that deletes all your reddit data. I doubt it'll actually do anything (reddit has no ethical framework so they won't think twice about indexing "deleted" data) but I still need to do that.
I'd bet a year of my salary that it only deletes it from public view so people can no longer get helped from Reddit's Google search results, but a copy (or more than one copy) is still retained on their internal servers.
The trick is to turn everything into randomized garbage and then delete it later. A lot of those purge services offer that feature. It just swaps the words with others; so on the surface it looks like proper written text, but it makes absolutely no sense.
Aside from removing your content that they're profiting from, it also feeds AI scrapers pure garbage in the event that your content is restored.
For text, AI training AI wouldn't be all that great for giving data sets a little poison ivy rubdown, because at the end of the day, the message is still moderated by a non bot. I think a better way would be to write more unconventionally, but heavily contextual so that if specifics texts are ripped and tossed into the bot blender, it'll make no sense without the context alongside it.
Slang, edge case wording, and verbing non verbs would likely do a lot of heavy lifting in that department.
Using LLMs for corporate communications - automatically-generated complaint responses, and the like - usually has swearing disabled, so if you want to fuck up their shit, be sure to express yourself with as many fucking swears as possible. Let's get that shit into those cunt's language models ASAP.
Yeah, I heard that, too. Consider that people who don't like tech may not have very reliable knowledge of tech. Regardless, OAI would appreciate your business.
spez says that's how he got reddit off the ground in the first place: faking content/engagement (well, genuinely engaging with his account(s?), but essentially shouting into the void and hoping enough people heard and wanted to stick around.
with a RedditUserBot trained on reddit users, you might be able to fake another decade of growth.
AI trainers do a lot of work filtering and reformatting the training data. Often that's the most expensive part. There's a lot of synthetic data used these days too, reprocessed by other AIs.
i stopped using reddit and deleted my accout and posts when they introduced those fucking nft-avatars and it seems that they've been going downhill ever since that.
When you delete your account and posts now, unless you edit them first, all deleting them does is hide their visibility in the database. The post is still there.
Nothing, but the lemmy admins can't be the only one's profiting from it. Reddit killed 3rd apps and academic research so they could be the sole profiteers of the user data.
That post reminded me that lemmee exists. Accounts didn't work that great when I first got here but I made one today and got verified. Logged out of Reddit for the last time and replaced my comments. Eff that place right in it's a-hole. Good riddance.